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Nowadays, technology has allowed various businesses to expand their reach and employ workers from all over the world. That means that companies are no longer limited to their location, country or even continent for that matter. Instead, they can look for top talents and employees most suited for their company culture across the globe. However, managing remote workers isn’t an easy task.

There are many challenges to overcome, such as different locations, time zones and many more, in order to ensure that your remote teams are efficient and that they feel like a valuable part of your company. Luckily, technology provides aid yet again. There are plenty of tools out there designed to improve the efficiency of telecommuting efforts for businesses that have remote offices and employees. The key is in finding the tools that suit your needs best. Here are a few tech tools that will help you improve your telecommuting efforts.

Project management

Project management tools are simply essential for every organization that has a remote workforce. Basically, these tools help gather everyone together on a single platform, as well as improve collaboration and communication company-wide. Tools, such as Basecamp, Trello, Active Collab and others help you assign specific tasks to different teams or individuals and set clear deadlines.

What’s more, each member of your organization can have a better understanding of the scope of the project with a project management tool. In addition, your employees can communicate and share information, while you monitor their progress.

Employee monitoring

Tracking your employee activity and productivity isn’t easy even when everyone is in the same office building, let alone when they’re scattered across the world. However, monitoring your employees is important, in order to ensure that everyone is doing their job and that they’re right on schedule.

With an employee monitoring solution, such as WorkPuls, you can track when your employees come to work and when do they leave, as well as track how productive they are during working hours. Moreover, you can track their time spent on individual tasks and have an insight into the applications they are using. You can even schedule screenshots regularly to effectively monitor your employees’ progress.

Communication

Establishing an effective line of communication with your remote workers is of the utmost importance. If you don’t communicate with your employees, there’s no way to encourage them to be more productive, drive engagement with your workers or know what kind of issues they might be facing. Furthermore, employees need to be able to communicate with each other and with managers as well.

That way, no important information will be lost and everyone can share data, as well as simply chat in order to feel cozier. For instance, Slack is a good example of a communication tool. It allows employees to chat in real time and you can set up channels for every team. Most importantly, Slack gives away a feeling of being present in the office, which is important for remote employees’ morale.

Video conferencing

It’s crucial to have face-to-face time with your remote workers. The main reason is that it prevents them from feeling isolated from the rest of the company and it’s a good way to improve their motivation, as well as their productivity. Moreover, your remote employees can attend meetings as if they were actually present in the office.

That’s why it’s important to establish means for good video conferencing. Tools, such as Skype and Google Hangouts can be invaluable for live video communications. After all, it’s important to meet up with your remote workers in person, so to speak, and allow them to meet the rest of the team as well. It helps build relationships and it also improves teamwork.

File sharing and storage

One of the most important things you need to take care of is ensure both your in-house and remote workers can store and share files and documents. Tools, such as Google Docs, Google Drive and Google GSuite for businesses, are a perfect fit for organizations with a remote workforce.

If you have any of these, not only will your employees be able to work on the same file, but it will also be safely stored in the cloud, which means no more lost files or broken hard drive issues. What’s more, creating spreadsheets and important presentations is easier than ever. Also, your remote workers can effectively collaborate and share files no matter where they are.

Telecommuting is an important aspect of any business that employs remote workers. In order to make the best out of remote work, you have to ensure that communication and collaboration between employees and managers alike is it its best. That’s why you should utilize various tools to make remote work more seamless and your telecommuting efforts more efficient.

When you as company decision-makers and managers what the biggest challenges for a successful outsourcing relationship with vendors is, it is far more likely than not that they will identify communication as one of those challenges.

Despite the huge leaps in communication technology, we are still not in a situation when outsourced partners are as present and as reachable as people who work on the premises. Luckily, there are ways in which we can encourage communication with outsourced partners and, subsequently, achieve better results from this collaboration.

Find the Right Outsourcing Partner

It should be pointed out that not all companies you can hire as outsourced partners are the same. Just like with anything else, you will find those that are great at what they do and those whose services can be found a bit lacking. Those companies that are not exactly top of the line will probably give you more headache communication-wise than those that really excel.

Namely, all great companies that provide services as outsourced partners understand the need for great communication and they will make you feel like you really do have a partner out there and not just someone who is taking money out of your pocket every month.

Be Clear about what you Want

Unless you are clear and direct with your outsourced partners early in your relationship, you cannot expect the lines of communication to remain open and to have any kind of a to-and-fro relationship where everything that needs to be discussed actually is discussed.

When discussing the terms of your future partnership, it is necessary that you ask your new partners how they handle communication with the companies they provide services for and whether they have any questions before you get into this business partnership of sorts.

You should also be very upfront and tell them exactly what you want from them and how you will want to clear up any future misunderstandings or changes to your relationship. If they seem uneasy committing to anything like that, do not back down and ensure they will be available to you and your people.

Take Advantage of Technology

One of the main reasons why outsourcing has become so popular over the last couple of years are the many leaps that communication technologies have made. In the past, you were reduced to conference calls which often descended into anarchy as lines were broken, different parties struggled to hear or convey their message.

It was a mess. And an expensive mess, at that.

Nowadays, you can take advantage of the innumerable ways of communication that are possible via the internet, from video calls which reduce the chances of misunderstanding to chat software which allows for quick resolutions of burning issues.

In case you use some kind of an intranet solution, you might even consider giving your outsourced partners limited access to certain parts of it; those parts that would allow them to do their job better and to communicate with your employees. If you do this, you have to ensure that their cybersecurity system is up to code and that you are not putting your company in any jeopardy.

Don’t Presume Anything

There is a line from an early Guy Ritchie’s movie which is a bit rude so we will not be writing it here, but the idea behind it is that presumption is the most common cause for all kinds of problems.

When we are talking an outsourced partnership, this is perhaps even truer than for other business situations since there are not people who are directly in your employ and who may not be familiar with the way you do things.

If you suspect they will have problems with a certain aspect of your account, make sure that you clear everything up before mistakes are made.

For example, until you are certain that your outsourced customer service representative understands your policies to the tiniest detail, go over it again and again. If you also employ some kind of mobile marketing automation, make sure your outsourced marketing agency is not doing anything that would undermine these efforts of yours, and vice versa.

If it requires innumerable emails and hour-long video chats, then so be it.

Your business is at stake and you cannot afford to have it put in danger because someone didn’t understand what their assignment was.

Above everything, encourage communication. Do not shy away from being boring and even annoying.